Thrown Missile Skill

Motivation

Thrown weapons are common in Exile, and throwing skill is cheap in both gold and skill points. Unfortunately, in all versions of Exile, throwing skill does not actually do anything. The chance to hit with a thrown missile attack depends strangely on the PC’s defense skill. It would be nice if throwing skill actually increased the chance to hit.

Remedy

Make the chance to hit with thrown missiles depend on throwing skill instead of defense.

Method

We just need to swap defense for thrown in the code that calculates the chance to hit with a thrown missile. It is a matter of subtracting 4 from the value of a single byte in the executable¹.

Windows 3.1 Versions

Use any hex editor to replace the byte as shown at the specified offset in the specified file.

File	Version	Offset (Decimal)	Change (subtract 4)
BLADES.EXE	v1.0.1	0x8B5DA (570842)	0x7a should be 0x76
EXILE3.EXE	v1.0b	0x7AF17 (503575)	0x4c should be 0x48
EXILE2.EXE	v2.0.1	0xC25DD (796125)	0xd8 should be 0xd4
EXILE.EXE	v2.0	0x5ABD9 (371673)	0x26 should be 0x22

Macintosh Versions (68k² )

Use a resource editor such as ResEdit to replace the byte 0x26 with the byte 0x22 at the specified offset of the specified CODE resource in the resource fork of the specified file.

File	CODE resource	Offset
Blades of Exile (fat) v1.0.2	CODE 7	0x3a0d
Exile III (fat) v1.0.3	CODE 7	0x363b
Exile II v2.0.3	CODE 1	0x4e91
Exile v2.0.1	CODE 3	0x82e1

Alternative Method without ResEdit

Normally we would use a resource editor such as ResEdit to modify the resource fork of any Macintosh files. However, since we are only changing the value of a constant, it is ok to use a plain hex editor in this case. Search the resource fork of the executable for the hex bytes 3d 70 08 26. The sequence will only appear once in each file. Change the 0x26 at the end of the sequence to 0x22.

Conclusion

Now when we spend skill points on throwing skill, it’s not a total waste.
Happy Adventuring!

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